Taking down the pictures at "the Alibi" - March 1974
This doesn't have anything to do with the property on Lincoln Street - I include this photograph to illustrate one of my mom's passing infatuations: The Lockheed L-1011 commercial aircraft, and her penchant for doing crafts. She starting doing these model pictures after she tired of making jewelry out of safety pins and beads, which superceded collecting and repairing dolls, which followed the resin grapes, swag lamps and ashtrays (many of which had rivets and small L-1011 components embedded in them). After the L-1011 would come the macrame plants, plants in general and then miniature dollhouses (which I had to wire for light). There were always yard sales, of course.
Anyway, the "Alibi" was the name of a cafe near the Lockheed aircraft plant which Mom managed. The cafe was near "B-1," on Empire Avenue (now a vast vacant lot since Lockheed left Burbank). Her flair for arts and crafts combined with her enthusiasm for the Lockheed L-1011 provided interior decor for the place (notice that she managed to paint the ceiling avocado - I'm pretty sure this was the last gasp for this color as it finally went out of style around the house).
Mom would build half of an L-1011 model in the colors of a certain company (Delta, TWA, Eastern, etc.), and secure it to a wooden board covered with sky blue felt. Then she would apply pieces of fiberglass angel's hair to simulate clouds (what with Christmas and these things we used up a lot of angel's hair). The resulting picture would go up in the cafe whether the owner (a member of a gay biker gang who terrorized the Burbank streets in their black leather jackets with pastel-colored patches), liked it or not. Simple arithmetic will reveal that she had a set of pictures of aircraft flying in one direction, and a set oriented in the opposite direction. The ones flying in the other direction were placed on the opposite wall.
The City of Burbank finally got around to condemning the place in its industrial redevelopment plan of the early seventies, and Mom then decided to go into business for herself. She bought a failing cafe business down the street (the Lincoln Cafe), and ran it for twelve years before selling it and retiring.
Here she is shown supervising the careful removal of her pictures. For all this concern they would be subject to a long period of neglect in a cardboard box in our back yard and eventual destruction by the elements.